Video data is currently distributed in a variety of different ways. For example, video data is transmitted in the form of broadcast television programmes which are received by a user and displayed using a television receiver. In recent times, such television programmes have been distributed by means of satellite transmissions and cable lines, in addition to more traditional radio frequency transmissions. Furthermore, it is well known to distribute recorded video data on storage media such as video cassettes and Digital Versatile Disks (DVDs).
Recently, the Internet has increasingly been associated with the distribution of video data. Software to display video data is readily available for conventional personal computers, but many users suffer from problems of bandwidth. For example, users connecting to the Internet via a modem and a dialup connection to an Internet Service Provider experience low data transmission rates, making real-time video very difficult to achieve, with displayed video having artefacts of “jerkiness” which is most disconcerting to a user, and impairs enjoyment of the video data. Similar problems exist when a mobile device such as a mobile telephone or handheld computer is used to access video data. Given these problems, many users download an entire broadcast, and then watch the downloaded broadcast. This is again disadvantageous, because this downloading can typically take many minutes to complete.
Even users using high bandwidth connections (generally known as “broadband” connections) can still encounter problems when high quality video data is involved, with the undesirable effects described above being experienced.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,647,535 (Xerox Corporation) describes a system for creating a storyboard from video data. The storyboard comprises a plurality of still images which are representative or key frames taken from the video data. The selected still images can then be displayed to a user by means of an Internet webpage, and a user can select one of the still images to cause a video clip associated with that image to be downloaded and displayed. Although this proposal provides a way of encapsulating a video clip by means of a relatively small number of still images, it suffers from some disadvantages. For example, using still images taken from the video data will not necessarily provide a meaningful and easily understandable indicator of the programme content of the associated video data.